


Get a life

by stillusesapencil



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Canon Compliant, Did I mention angst, F/M, I should be doing homework, Time is Weird, this started as some ramblings about feelings and turned into the tale of steve's adventures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 09:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillusesapencil/pseuds/stillusesapencil
Summary: ENDGAME SPOILERSstill spoilersgo away if you haven't seen the moviebegone, thotSteve takes the stones. And makes his choice.





	Get a life

**Author's Note:**

> Look, dudes, I saw endgame and some big feelings so I started writing even though at one point I said I was never going to write for this fandom again and here we are. I don't even know if this makes sense. I have some papers to write and a test to study for yet here we are. 
> 
> If you didn't like the end of endgame, this isn't for you. This isn't a "fix-it." This works with canon. I'm all for putting up middle fingers at canon, but this one is compliant. 
> 
> Anyway. Let me know if this is any good.

Five years have passed. Five years in which the world moved on. Well, moved on is relative. No one really “moved on.” They limp along, half of themselves gone, walking on only one foot. But still, five years have passed. 

Parents return home to children who are five years older, wiser, harder, and lonelier for it. Children find out that their pets have died. Twins are no longer twins, because one is five years older. An elderly woman wakes up in an empty house, because her spouse died while she was gone. Best friends find that one of them is married, while the other still cannot legally drink. People find that their houses are falling apart, or that other people live there now. A man finds that his wife remarried in his absence. There are younger siblings who are now the older sibling, and single mothers suddenly have their husband again. 

Five years have passed. People have to relearn the rules of living. Driver’s licenses open up another category: _snapped y/n_ , because it affects your age. People walk around every day knowing their name is on a monument as one of the fallen. It’s a heavy thing to know what it’s like to be grieved while you are still alive. 

Five years have passed. There are whales in the harbor, because there are less ships, but now there are more people and more ships, and the whales have to move back out of the harbor. There are more of them now, too. Pollution has cleared some, because there was half the output, half the people, but also half the trees. 

Companies have to open up new positions and shuffle their employees because five years have changed a lot. Governments have to reorganize _again_ , because their leader has suddenly returned. The world is older and more confusing that it has ever been, and Steve is so very, very tired.

Tony’s funeral is a send off worthy of a hero. Tony is a man of international significance, for more than one reason, and his funeral is highly publicized and reported. Steve gets asked for interviews, and he raises a hand and says, “No comment.” Eventually, Rhondey will coach him through a professional statement about Tony being a great man and a good hero, words that will sound small and overused in comparison to who Tony really was. 

Natasha’s funeral is much quieter. They have the ceremony at Clint’s farm. Laura makes a fantastic dinner, and they all picnic after. Bruce says a few words, but has to stop halfway through because he starts crying, and Hulk makes some very big tears. There is no coffin to bury, no body to be laid to rest. It’s just her friends—no, her family—gathered together to remember her. Once official words are said, they simply talk. Remember. They recall her strength, her kindness, her sass. Wanda shares stories of her mentorship during their years as avengers together. Pepper talks about the stretch of time when Nat was undercover and they had to manage Tony together. Thor remembers her a great warrior, and Sam recalls the times they spent undercover. Bucky haltingly tells a few fractured memories from Russia. 

Clint has the most to say. She was his partner for so long. He knew her, inside and outside, knew all her tells and most of her history. 

Steve says little, but he cries a lot, the tears rolling quietly down his cheeks. Nat was his best friend for the past ten years. She was there when he woke; when he learned about Hydra; when he found Bucky; when he tried to navigate the modern world. She was always there with a smirk and a joke—a suggestion of a date, a new movie to watch, a new prank to play. She was always there with a straight spine and a locked jaw—she was watching his back, and he was ready to cover he with his shield when needed. 

He didn’t get to say goodbye. 

But then, he never really has. Things are always being ripped from his hands in an untimely manner. He never gets a chance to slow down and breathe and have a real life. It’d be nice. 

In this new world (post-Tony, post-Natasha, post-snap and unsnap) he and Sam and Bucky and Bruce build a bachelor village in the woods. Trailers and tents and science. They have to return the stones, and Bruce has to figure out time travel again, but this time without Tony. 

It takes him six months. 

They live in the woods for six months, these men, Bucky cooking over the campfire likes its 1942, and Sam playing them music like it’s 1985. What a good time they have, out there. Steve watches Bucky and Sam become friends. 

Sam sticks magnets to Bucky’s arm. Bucky draws on Sam’s wings. They wash the dishes together at night, slapping each other with dish towels and laughing loudly. They prank and poke and laugh, and God, Steve is so damn happy just to be there. It’s a small taste of what it would be like, to live a semi-normal life. 

Steve aches. 

Before he goes, he sits Bucky down. 

“I’ve been thinking.”

“That you’re not coming home, I know.” Bucky tips his head back to smile, dimples cracking and webbing over his face. “Go get your girl, Steve. Go live a life for damn once, and stop trying to save everyone else’s.”

Steve tears up at that, and reaches out to squeeze Bucky’s hand. 

Bruce sends him away to return the stones from the moment they were taken. 

He takes the power stone first, going right back to the temple and carefully sliding it through the shield. Some magic takes over, and the stone gravitates right back to where it goes. Before his eyes, Nebula and Rhodey vanish. Outside, Quill is singing. Steve rubs the time stone in his pocket and shoots through time again. 

The aether goes back into Jane, and with it, Mjolnir. In the Asgard palace, he is greeted by a woman in shakespearian theatre garb, and she smiles like she knows all his secrets. 

“Come to return what was taken?”

Steve nods. “Yes ma’am.”

“And Mjolnir?”

He nods again. 

She holds out her hands. “Let me help you.” He holds out the vial of aether, and she turns it in her hands before leading him to Jane’s room. 

Jane knows him, looking horribly confused, but there is something about the woman (queen? mother?) beside him that makes Jane trust Steve as he injects the aether back into her. Jane slumps to the floor. Steve sets down the hammer by the bed.

“I’m sure Thor will find this eventually,” he says.”

“Don’t worry,” the woman says, “I’ll make sure he gets it.” And she picks it up to cradle in her arms. 

He is honored for the time he had with the hammer. It chose him as worthy, though he was surprised by that choice. But the hammer, too, belongs in the past, and not his past. The hammer belongs, and will always belong, to Thor.

The tesseract goes back into the hands of shield/hydra in 1970. Each stone has it’s own struggles. Steve flinches at the knowledge that hydra lives in shield and will for forty more years. Jesus. 

He returns the mind stone without having to fight his past self, thank god. Past Steve is young and hopeful and _really annoying._ Current Steve is old and tired and full of spite. 

He wonders if returning the stones will erase the timeline they accidentally created where Sitwell thinks Steve is Hydra and Steve knows Bucky is alive, and Loki runs away with the tesseract. He hopes it gets erased. 

On a rooftop in New York, 2012, a small, bald woman looks at him with arrogance in her eyes, but she carries wisdom in the set of her shoulders. 

He holds out the small green stone. “I’ve come to return this.”

The woman looks down at him and gracefully takes the stone. She sets it into her necklace and nods at him. “Thank you, Steven Rogers. I wish you well on your journey.” She tilts her head. “Perhaps stay a moment, and rest.” 

Steve sighs, and lets himself be lead to a room with tea and a bed, and he sleeps. He slept for 70 years, and yet he is still tired. It is a traveller’s exhaustion—the fatigue of one who wants to go home. And yet Steve has no home. He has Bucky and Sam, sure, but that is a world that does not feel like home. Bucky has been with him forever, but Steve knows the choice he will make. 

The woman—the Ancient one—schools him on Time, and travel and change. 

“Some things are fixed. They will always happen, no matter what. Some things can change. The stones hold the power to make time flow smoothly, just as it should. You can do what you can, and still some things will not change.” 

He saves the soul stone for last, because if he has the stone, it’s almost like he has Natasha. It’s like her death meant something. But it has to go back. So he goes. 

The black spectral being floats down at him and says, “Steven, son of Joseph,” and throws off his hood.

The crimson skull looks at him and Steve almost throws his shield right then, but Schmidt says, “I am already dead. What you would do to me is pointless.”

“How are you here?” he grits out. 

“The stones have many powers; saving my life was one of them.”

“Why would they choose you?”

“This?” Schmidt spreads his arms. “This is a curse, captain. An eternal purgatory interrupted only by the souls of the sacrificed.”

Steve clenches his jaw and holds out the stone. “Take it.” 

Schmidt holds out a ghostly red claw, and Steve drops the stone. 

He looks to the cliff where Clint said she died. Schmidt opens his arm as if to direct him. 

He approaches the cliff, unsure whether or not to look over. She isn’t there. Her body is gone.

He drops to his knees, tears in his eyes. He had wanted to say goodbye. That’s all. Just a goodbye. They had once talked about their inability to move on. She was hung up on past sins; he was hung up on past loves. They had both lost people, so many people. He’d never thought he’d lose her like this. 

Behind him, Schmidt laughs. “I never understood your humanity, captain.”

Rage boils in Steve, so to keep himself from doing something stupid, he sets his bracelet and lets time suck him away. 

It takes him some time to find her, but when he does, she looks at him with tears in her eyes and says, “Oh Steve. You came back.” 

She wraps her arms around him and he pulls her close to his chest, and something settles in him. This is all he’s wanted for so long. So long. 

It’s time to get a life. He thinks of Natasha. _You first_ , she’d said. 

He and Peggy build their life quietly. He changes his name a grows a beard. They let Howard in on the secret, and the man cooks up something to ensure that Steve will age like a normal person. 

Steve spends his life trying hard not to change anything. They have children—and he recognizes them from the pictures that will sit at Peggy’s bedside. 

So he was always meant to be here. 

They grow old together. Peggy is the director of Shield, and Howard has a son. Little niece Sharon grows up learning how to fire a gun under Peggy’s capable hands. Steve meets the original Jarvis, and remembers a computer that has not yet been built. It is an odd thing—to have memories of things that have not happened yet. Sometimes he whispers to Peggy things about the future-- _they have phones in their pockets, Peggy. And wait until there’s internet. You’ll love that._ \--but mostly he keeps it to himself. The shield stays in the back closet, there just in case. 

He lives through most of the 20th century, just watching the world change. This is way he was meant to see it happen, slowly, not all at once. 

2012 comes and goes as he remembers it, no revisions. Time has a way of getting things where they need to be. Or maybe it’s the stones. He doesn’t know. 

Natasha comes around sometimes, and he gets to have more time with her, albeit very differently. It never gets any easier.

Peggy gets old and gets forgetful, and he hates seeing it happen. It is no easier slow than it is fast. His younger self comes and visits her. She never lets a word of their secret slip, even on her worst days. She will always be stronger than he knows. 

He sees himself carry her coffin. The worst part is living through this funeral twice. 

And when the time comes, he takes his shield to the lake, and he passes it on to Sam. Bucky smiles, with tears in his eyes. Steve got to live his life. Bucky is just about to start his. 

Steve has lived so long and so many times over. He thanks God he got to finally live a life the way he’s always wanted. He spent a long time being Captain America, and Peggy let him be just Steve. He’s thankful, he’s proud, and he’s sad. 

Many years have passed. Steve finally got to move on. 

*

 _Get a life_ , she’d said. 

_I will_ , he replied.

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://www.stillusesapencil.tumblr.com)


End file.
